Background: Among the most contested topics within special education research concerns racial disparities in students identified with disabilities. This phenomenon, referred to as disproportionality in special education placement, is historically rooted in concerns surrounding the overrepresentation of Black students in special education across public schools in the United States (Donovan & Cross, 2002). More recently, however, this narrative of disproportionality has been questioned by research suggesting that, when taking into account a number of student background characteristics and peer racial and socioeconomic composition, Black students may in fact be underrepresented in special education relative to their White peers, specifically in high-minority schools (Elder et al., 2021; Morgan et al., 2015). Consequently, there have been calls to retract recent policy mandates that regard descriptive evidence of overrepresentation as a major concern to address, as these may deprive students of special education services they are entitled to and need to succeed. While traditional statistics used to measure disproportionality are useful in providing basic information on differences between groups, they do not elucidate which groups are "accurately" identified, nor do they discern the degree to which such differences are warranted. Whether there are too many or too few students in special education overall and within demographic groups is thus unclear. Prior qualitative research, however, has suggested that, at least in urban schools, special education is used too often, particularly due to a lack of resources to effectively manage disruptive behavior, along with cultural mismatches between students and teachers education (Skiba et al., 2006). Study purpose: In this study, I sought to investigate whether providing teachers with additional forms of support to refer struggling learners and address behavioral issues reduces special education rates at the school level. Support here is operationalized through an integrated student support program, where school social workers (i.e., coordinators) work directly with teachers, students, and families to evaluate every child for their respective strengths and weaknesses. Coordinators then connect students with targeted supports both within and outside of the schools through community partners. Services provided range from academic enrichment opportunities to basic health and socio-emotional needs. Prior research investigating the effects of the intervention have found positive impacts on academic achievement (Walsh et al., 2014). Additional qualitative work has found that teachers in schools implementing the intervention report having a better understanding of the whole child, which in turn makes the teachers feel more supported in their ability to help students academically and emotionally (Sibley et al., 2017). Data and methodology: Using school-level data from two, racially diverse urban school districts in the Northeast spanning 2006 and 2019, I investigated how rates of special education placement changed following adoption of the integrated student support intervention. The sample includes 140 elementary or middle schools, and approximately 40% of these schools (n=57) received the intervention for at least one year during the study years. Both school districts have among the highest rates of special education placement in the state, although rates among Black, Hispanic, and White students are approximately similar after considering prior achievement. Preliminary work has shown that student achievement does not improve for most students following placement in special education, suggesting either inadequacy or misalignment of supports. To address the research question, I used an event study design to estimate changes in the proportion of students placed in special education for treatment schools for each year following implementation, relative to the last pretreatment period. Such an analysis is robust to pre-existing differences in schools and only requires that the treatment and comparison schools demonstrated parallel trends in the outcome measure in the pretreatment period. Parallel trends offer strong evidence that comparison schools provide an appropriate counterfactual for what would have occurred to treatment schools in the posttreatment period had they not received treatment. Simply stated, this analysis answers whether or not the introduction of the intervention to schools affected their overall special education classification rates. To minimize concerns over bias stemming from two-way effects models (see Goodman-Bacon, 2021), as well as better match pre-intervention trends in special education rates, I used the estimator developed by Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021). Baseline measures used for matching included school demographic characteristics and prior achievement. Results and discussion: Main results are presented in Figure 1, As depicted by the blue part of the figure, prior to the implementation of the intervention, treatment and comparison schools (which include both never and not-yet treated schools) were not trending distinctly in regards to special education rates. This satisfies the assumption of parallel trends. Following implementation of the intervention, there is no significant break from this trend, demonstrating no effect on special education rates. By the conference date, I will perform subgroup analyses by race and gender to examine whether the distribution of students in special education changed following the intervention. These preliminary findings suggest that supporting teachers with different avenues for addressing student needs does not lead to decreased use of special education. While it may be that teachers are simply not maximizing use of the supports, internal evaluations of the intervention suggest this is not the case (Author, 2020). Rather, this study suggests that teachers are likely referring students to special education for justifiable reasons rather than simply needing to get students some out-of-classroom support. Efforts to decrease the number of students placed in special education out of fears of exacerbating inequities may thus be more harmful if students are deprived of such supports. Policymakers in this context should consider how best to improve special education supports, rather than discourage the use of them.